ManTalk: Help for sexually abused men

Social worker Robert Wright started Mantalk, a support group for men who have been sexually abused. (TED PRITCHARD / Staff)

Andrew DeShaw is a childhood sexual abuse survivor. He carried his secret for over three decades.

In 2009, at age 42, DeShaw finally disclosed his abuse to a neurologist. She’d asked him — after he was rushed to hospital, his face drooped to one side — if he’d ever been sexually abused.

It was the second time the physical ailment had struck.

“I just buried it, buried it deeply,” DeShaw recalled in an interview. “As soon as I started talking, it all came out and my physical reactions just stopped right on a dime.

“I was shocked at the extreme severity of my physical reaction. It was so bad.”

DeShaw’s abuser was a man who was not a relative. Until he disclosed his abuse, DeShaw had no recollection of it.

“I had also adopted this alter ego of superman so that not only did I not have recollection, ‘but no one would ever do that to me anyway, look at me,’” he said.

Years later, DeShaw found a therapist who helped him confront some of the abuse. While his daytime physical reactions to it diminished, he continued to have nighttime terrors and anxiety.

As a mental health social worker, DeShaw, 48, sees daily the profound impact sexual abuse has on the people he helps. But it still took him years to come to terms with what happened to him.

After losing one social work job and a failed marriage, DeShaw fell into a clinical depression that lasted several months. All he could do was sleep. Later came a diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the fall of 2011, DeShaw was among a small group in Halifax who met for the first time for ManTalk, a support group for men who have been sexually abused. The men initially met for eight weeks.

Robert Wright, a Halifax social worker in private practice, started ManTalk.

When Wright did his clinical training in the special housing unit that housed mentally disordered, protective-custody and death-row inmates at Washington State Penitentiary from 1996-1997, he found that many of the men there suffered from trauma-related kinds of emotional problems. As a result, he ended up studying the problem.

A social worker for 25 years, Wright has also worked extensively with at-risk young men in Nova Scotia who suffered from violence and trauma but had not been treated.

“The need for work with men who had been victims had been a thread throughout my career, I just never had the opportunity to do anything about it,” Wright said. “So, 31/2 years ago I left government to go back to school. I said, ‘Well one of the things I’m going to do in my private practice is I’m going to work with men who’ve been sexually victimized.’”

A core group of about seven men still meet the first and third Wednesday of each month in Halifax. Others who have since “graduated” from the group keep Wright posted on the progress they are making in their lives. And a few other men have joined.

The average age of those in the group is mid-40s. Some are retired or semi-retired.

“We’ve had professionals and labourers, people with rural backgrounds, people with urban backgrounds,” Wright said. “So it’s been a wide cross-section of men.”

Still, ethnic diversity continues to be an issue for the group. Most of the attendees are white “despite the fact that I’m a well-recognized black guy,” Wright said.

“Probably the majority of men who have come to and stuck with the group have identified as gay or bisexual and the vast majority of men have been white,” Wright said. “I think it’s related to the power of the stigma of being sexually abused. I think it’s harder for straight men to talk about that experience than it is for gay men.

“The other thing too, of course, is that because it’s so difficult for men to come to terms with being sexually abused, it’s often … older men who have gone through the cycle of denying that their abuse has happened.”

In most cases, he said, they have lived “decades with the experiences of failed relationships and/or failed employment until they arrive at the place in their mid-40s when they say, ‘I’ve got to get help.’”

Under Wright’s supportive guidance, the group does not spend all of its time rehashing all the grisly details of their abuse. Often, he said, the focus is on how the abuse has affected the men in their relationships, activities and functioning.

“But the group is a safe place where, when it’s necessary and appropriate, a man can say, ‘Look, I’ve been dealing with this flashback and I can’t get this image out of my head, and I feel like I just need to talk it through,’” Wright said.

“So sometimes a man will talk about the detail. And, of course, in a room full of men who have been sexually abused a detailed disclosure can be very triggering.”

So part of Wright’s job is to help normalize the subject and to talk about it openly so that the men can talk about how they are being affected by those triggers.

“Because you’ve got to go home at the end of the night,” DeShaw said. “That’s the whole focus of the group, to (talk) about how can we get back to functioning in the world. Can we function in a world other than being sexually abused? I mean that can’t be the be all and end all of my existence.”

Being attached to ManTalk is some of the most powerful work Wright, a former director of child welfare, executive director of Nova Scotia’s Child and Youth Strategy, student support worker and correctional mental health specialist, has done.

“The men who have come and attached themselves to the group report profound changes in the way their lives have been affected,” he said.

“It’s just so powerful to watch men and to be with men while they’re going from broken family relationships to engagement in their families.”

Any person who identifies as a man over the age of 19 and has been sexually abused is eligible to join ManTalk.

Due to the success of ManTalk, Wright is planning to establish YoungManTalk for male victims of sexual abuse between the ages of 16 and 25 as a pro bono service of his private practice.